Dr. Dobb's | Rhetorical Initiative I

Rhetorical Initiative I

Douglas Adams: a man I admire for many reasons. One is that he invented a new figure of speech, the antisimile. On the particular Thursday that opens The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the day Earth is due for demolition, something is moving quietly through the ionosphere: "several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky slablike somethings, huge as office blocks, silent as birds". They descend, fail to be observed by Jodrell Bank and Cape Canaveral, and halt:

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

August 30, 2009
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/rhetorical-initiative-i/228700169